The capabilities of the cloud have literally changed the way organizations view remote work. Because it is designed to simplify access from anywhere, the cloud allows organizations to efficiently manage their remote workforce by handling more typical in-house IT tasks. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is one of the key technologies that can improve how your business operates. So what is it and how can it help you?

What is Azure Active Directory?

Plenty of office networks utilize Microsoft’s Active Directory to manage policies and permissions. What Azure AD does is to put that capability on the cloud. In short, it’s a cloud-based directory and identity management system. This infrastructure will enable your employees to sign in and access external resources in Office 365 as well as other SaaS applications. Being entirely cloud-based means that Azure AD can serve as your only directory or use Azure AD Connect to sync up with your on-premises directory.

Transforming your business

Azure Active Directory gives IT complete control over access to apps and resources. This is because of security protocols such as conditional access and MFA. By using built-in governance controls, IT can also apply automated lifecycle management and privileged access limitations. For end-users, they are going to benefit from faster and easier access to corporate resources using various devices and from just about anywhere. And with support for other virtual tools and operating systems, Azure AD enables you to leverage the technologies that are best for you.

Business security will improve

Azure AD has a wide range of security protocols to safeguard your organization from malicious or accidental issues. These include multi-factor authentication (MFA), privileged identity management (PIM), conditional access, and threat detection. Using MFA and conditional access will give you improved application security and management control. And then you also have advanced threat protection that gives you access to comprehensive reporting that monitors application usage. With this, you can apply enhanced security measures to protect your business.

Improving customer security

Customers need hassle-free solutions with robust security to optimize their experiences. And with Azure Active Directory B2C you get a product that fully delivers. It uses reliable, proactive security measures to ensure world-class protection. Customers will get highly secure access across your web and mobile apps through MFA. Add threat detection to that and customers can have peace of mind knowing that their identities are very secure. Because the platform is based on Microsoft Azure, you’ll also retain the significant potential to scale according to your needs.

Adapting to innovation

Trying to hold on to legacy systems can prove very costly to a business. Not only are they costly to maintain but the complexity of running them is hardly worth it. Technology such as Azure Active Directory offers you incredible benefits for modernizing your infrastructure. With increased security and customer satisfaction, reduced overhead, and more streamlined operations, it’s worth signing up for or at least reading up on these technologies.